Fully Loaded Chair is stuffed with shotgun shells

Alexander Reh’s Fully Loaded Chair is composed of a solid steel frame stuffed to the bore with 12-gauge shotgun shells. I like the thoughtful design: notice that the payload points away from the sitter. You can be confident in haphazardly flinging yourself into its ensconcement. Another plus: the chair can always be broken apart for ammo in case for Z-Day.

I know, based on first hand experimentation (aka learning the hard way) that if you manage to set off a shotshell not in a gun it will blow the primer out of the shell at a very substantial velocity and then a very brief jet of fire shoots out of the hole the primer leaves behind. The primer is in the brass part of the shell, and it is seated only by being forced into the shell from below.

In this chair, these primers are pointed direclty at the sitter. The shot itself does not even leave the shell- most of the time the shell won’t even open on the “business end.” Smokeless powder is not explosive unless it’s under pressure, so once the primer is blown out the remaining powder just burns rather than really exploding.

Yeah, so the last time my 10 year old buddies and I did this, we did it by shooting the primer with a BB gun. The primer blew right into my friend Tony’s head, and he has a lump on his head in this spot still, 30 years later.

I would like to submit that the type of knowledge and experience that anon above has provided is exactly what we are depriving kids today of by supervising and scheduling their every second. Although I’m now sorely tempted to try the experiment for myself.